News

New Snapshot available - including the date bar

31 Dec 2004 23:00 +0000

Integrating the date bar in the application was way easier than I
anticipated, so a new snapshot is now available which includes
the date bar. The date bar both shows the statistics of your
images, but may also be used for navigation, simply click on a
date in the date bar, and you will be shown images from that
date. This is what it looks like.

So far KPhotoAlbum have had no need for your images to be sorted, but the
date bar works by far best if they are (Jumping to a given
date will show all images from that date). KPhotoAlbum thus
have a new function to aid you in ensuring that all your
images have valid dates (which might be something as simple
as 1998-2001). Once you have given all your images a valid
date, use the sorting function from the Images menu to sort your images.

Previous versions showed the thumb nails of your images in folder of 100
images per folder, but for the date bar to work, all images
are now shown in one folder. The previous setup was not by
design, but simply because I couldn't figure out how to
avoid loading all thumb nails at once. Now, fortunately I
found out, so showing 10.000 thumb nails doesn't course your
computer to load gigabytes of memory. Let me know if you have a very good
reason for re-adding the folder view with each 100 images.

New Date bar

27 Dec 2004 23:00 +0000

Over the last month I've worked hard on a date bar showing statistics about
images, and also helping navigating wrt. dates. I'm pretty done
with the date bar itself now, and is now working on
integrating it into KPhotoAlbum. This is what
it looks like

New snapshot available

Tokens (press a letter in the viewer, and that will be an item of that category)

An option have been added to automatically show the thumbnail view when the number of matches during browsing gets below a given count.

Searching for new images can be disabled during start up, this will make start up faster.

KPhotoAlbum 2.0 released

17 Oct 2004 22:00 +0000

Eight month of coding and waiting are finally over, KPhotoAlbum 2.0 has
today been released. The new version contains a lot of improvements and speed
optimizations. Below I'll highlight a few of the improvements, the
full story can be read from the ChangeLog
file.

Major Improvements

The most noticeable change seen from the users point of view are KPhotoAlbum's new plugin structure, code name
KIPI. The plugin
structure has been created together with the Digikam and Gwenview team. Our three application now shares a common plugin structure,
which makes it possible to write a plugin which works with all three application.
The 2.0 release has been postponed a number of due to KIPI not being available. It is so now, but the port of the old
digikam plugins are not completely done yet, though a beta version is available.
See the KIPI page to learn about available plugins.

It is now possible to not only share your images with your friend, you annotation can also be shared using the new import/export
functionality (Who is on the image, where is it taken etc). When generating HTML pages, an export file will automatically be created,
making it as simple for your friends to get your annotations, as clicking on this link.
See the documentation for details.

KPhotoAlbum 2.0 has two important optimizations over KPhotoAlbum 1.1. First
the image configuration dialog loads much faster, and second images in the viewer are pre-loaded, which makes the viewer much more
snappy to work with.

Minor Improvements

It is now possible to sort list box items in the image configuration dialog.

It is now possible to sort the image by date using "Images->Sort Selected By Date and Time"

It is now possible to start a slide show from the thumbnail view.

Shortcuts can now be configured for the viewer.

The toolbar can now be configured.

It is now possible to find images where only a set of items are on (e.g. only me, and no one else)

It is now possible to hide the labels in the thumbnail view.

Thew viewer now contains a zoom out to full view function.

An automatic category has been created, which displays the directory of the image, making it semi possible to browse based on directory.

The editor for image comments now has an on the fly spell checker.

Important Bugfixes

Scaling of images are now done correctly, which gives much smoother thumbnails.